Verwandte Artikel zu The Discarded Life

The Discarded Life - Softcover

Kirsch, Adam

 
9781636280158: The Discarded Life

Inhaltsangabe

In these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks—from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster—to tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adam Kirsch is a poet and critic whose writing appears regularly in The New Yorker and other publications. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry and several books of criticism and biography, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. An editor at the Wall Street Journal, he has taught at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. He was born in Los Angeles and now lives in New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Three muppets, alternating in a rhyme—
Cat, sat, hat, perhaps, or ball, hall, wall—
Seemed as surprised as I was when a fourth
Darted between them and the camera lens,
Shouting the rhymes that he had taken over
As if they were a war-cry or a curse.
Whatever gentle souls at PBS
Designed the skit or held the muppet-strings
Would have been shocked to see the way I tore
In sudden terror from the living room,
A categorical, instinctive fear
That had no remedy or explanation,
And wouldn’t be repeated till the night,
Years later, when the screen of my Atari,
Normally filled with blocky cars and spaceships,
Vomited up a solid wall of symbols—
Hashmarks, exclamations, ampersands—
My brain could not decode or tolerate.
If nothing’s been as terrifying since,
Perhaps I owe it to those early glitches
That taught me how to apprehend the form
Disaster takes, the sudden rushing-up
Of something that is not supposed to be.


„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.